Emma Who Saved My Life (60 page)

Why didn't you die?

“They figured it all out, that I was the barbiturate and booze case left unattended in the hallway and that they had given me a sedative on top of it, and there's nothing as efficient as a hospital in the face of a major malpractice suit. I got hooked up—I mean I was out for two days, I don't remember this—I got hooked up to a life-support system. I mean, compared to major Marilyn Monroe booze and pills-takers, I was small change. What? Five or six shots of vodka, a few hundred milligrams—that's not good but it's not heavy-duty death.”

And then to the addicts' program at Bellevue.

“Well, I was a dangerous patient—after my little rampage—prone to violence, a risk to society. They sent me here to help their case if I filed for malpractice. It had to look like my own grandmother would have given me that sedative, that it was a well-intentioned accident. And it was, I guess. They didn't mean to nearly kill me. And I like being in Bellevue—I mean, Delmore Schwartz was here, this place has
major
street cred, you know?”

I smiled.

“It does, it does. Everyone good came here. My hospital stay is going to be on all my press releases, but no Anne Sexton screwed-up mess routine as that's been done and done. I want to be the Jerry Lee Lewis of women poets—I'm looking for Kerouac here, Dylan Thomas, living on the edge, living too wildly, a doomed self-destructive figure. If I check out I want to go out like Janis Joplin and not Alice James, if you see what I mean.”

Whatever you say Emma. But you are going to have to quit the pills now, right?

Emma looked to the Christmas lights in the window. “Did you know getting off barbiturates is harder than kicking heroin?”

Yes,
I
told you that.

“This is going to take a while.”

And suddenly as she looked away to the window I was glad, glad and relieved that it wouldn't be me that stood to her side, helped her along. A purely selfish moment I had there: Thank God, you got away free and clear, away from these meteoric rises and descents. And then I looked at Emma. Life was always going to be like this for her. And yet, it also came to me, she would always survive herself, somehow. Despite the follies there was something strong in Emma, a will to selfishness, an indomitable ego—I'm not sure what—but it would keep her alive and complaining and stirring up the dust all her days. Admit it, Gil, there was something attractive in this woman, something fierce and opinionated and gifted, whatever the calamities. But also realize, Gil, that she will never need you or anybody, she is self-sufficient, she may be impervious even to those who love her.

“I want to be Whittier, I've decided,” said Emma.

Gee Emma, I think you're witty enough for—

“No. John Greenleaf Whittier, minor poet.”

I thought you wanted to be a major poet.

“No, I want to be a minor poet. It's better being a minor poet, I've decided.”

Hmmm.

“No, now think about it. You say Auden or Eliot or Tennyson or anybody major and you get an argument—Auden's trash, no Eliot wasn't any good at all, Tennyson's a hack. Yeats was good at the end—no, you're crazy it's only at the beginning he's any good, before he fell in with Pound, that crackpot. Crackpot? He's a genius! See, you can't get any agreement on the really great ones. But you stop anybody on the street and go, quick, who was Cullen Bryant, who was Longfellow … and they'll say, those guys were poets. No argument. I don't want there to be any argument.”

Yeah but Whittier's a trivia question. Have
you
read him, Emma?

“Of course not. Minor poets aren't read—that makes them minor poets. I don't care, after I'm dead, if they read me or not, I just want to be thought of as a poet, no questions asked.” Her face brightened: “I want to be Stephen Spender.
No one
says he isn't a poet, no one argues he's anything but a good minor poet. That's bliss. They'll be debating Berryman and Stevens until the cows come home, but they won't be debating James Russell Lowell and Stephen Spender.”

Well I wouldn't know, I said.

“I got a positive attitude now, Gil baby. I'm Miss Positive now. A year ago if I couldn't be the female John Keats I was going to kill myself, now I want to be Whittier. I think that's healthy.”

Whittier.

“Yeah, Whittier. I want schoolchildren in future generations to have to write papers on me, memorize my name. I want high schools named after me—aah aah aah … almost slipped back into delusions of grandeur there. I've still got to watch myself. I want … I want shopping malls named after me. I'm setting my sights a little lower now.”

Yeah, I sighed, I used to think if I hadn't won the Tony by thirty that I couldn't live with myself.

“Well you got some time left still.”

We both broke into an imitation of Odessa simultaneously: “Gil, huhney, 1983 is gonna be YAWR YEEUH…” And Emma added, “You know, Gil, it just might be your year. This thing you're in now is famous; it's been written up everywhere.”

Well not for me, for the star, Rosemary Campbell—it's her vehicle.

“It's not as if you're a spear carrier, c'mon.”

No I'm very happy about it, I said. But I wasn't happy about it. Why couldn't I tell Emma—the only person I knew who wouldn't criticize me for not being grateful for how far I've come, etc.? Because she was not part of my life anymore, that's why. If she couldn't need me I wasn't going to need her. I'd been absent from her life and vice versa nine months—that was a good start. She has her habit to kick, I have my habit to kick.

“God I wish I had a job where I got to have a room full of people clap at me and cheer me every night. How could you miss, doing that for a living?”

Oh Emma, if you knew how much I wanted them to get their clapping over with so I could go home and get on with my life. I'll act for the two hours they paid for but do I have to give rhapsodies about how wonderful the applause is when it's just a bunch of people scrambling for car keys thinking about the crowds and the quickest way out of the city or hailing a taxi, and me up there thinking about getting home in time for the late movie? I really wanted to let her know that I didn't love the theater like I used to, that I'd changed somehow—perhaps she could put it into words for me, help me. NO. Resist temptation, boy. You've done your duty call here; say a polite goodbye and leave.

“Has anyone asked for your autograph yet?”

I stood up and walked to the window with the Christmas lights and looked at them blink on and off and make red-orange and blue-green forms and lines and shadows. No, I told Emma, not yet.

“One of these days. We'll be sitting at a cafe on the West Side and fans will hound us and the papers will take paparazzi shots of famous poet, famous actor, out getting drunk together—that'll be something, won't it?”

Yeah. And I look out the window, beyond the lights, looking out beyond the security fence and the dreary-looking park below, and there's a piece of the Queensborough Bridge and some part of Queens, and the East River before me, a dirty barge floating with the tide.

“It's time to go isn't it?” Emma said with a sad voice.

Oh my, someone had to say the words and she said them: It was time to go, time to pack our bags and leave and try somewhere else. No, I often told myself,
don't
leave New York yet, not so soon, not so soon after you had some measure of success. The city holds plenty for you still; don't overreact. Didn't I still love it? Yeah, the idea of it, but the living-day-to-day of it not as much. You're in a slump, Gil, I told myself. Another voice said: No you're not, dummy, you're riding high. This is as good as it's gotten. Why aren't you happy then? Well I was for a week, I think—the week after I got cast. And the day I met Rosemary Campbell was exciting. There have been moments—but not as good as you thought the moments would be, huh? Oh Emma, if only you hadn't pulled the thread: that it was time to go. I was being silent so I said: Yeah, I guess within the year or so I'll be moving out of old New York. I've been thinking that way lately.

But Emma stirred herself up in bed. “
Are you crazy?
Leave New York?”

I thought you said—

“Time to leave Bellevue, yes, but not New York! Gil
life
is New York, when one tires of New York, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, one tires of life! What are you going to do? Go live in a cave in Illinois? Remember the Village People Principle…”

(Only Emma could hit Samuel Johnson and the Village People in a single stroke of rhetoric.) The Village People Principle is simply that New York functions at one level of sophistication, the country at another. Remember the Village People? This disco pop band of the late '70s. They dressed up in all the gay-stereotype uniforms (the leatherman, the hardhat) played in gay clubs, sang about San Francisco (the big gay city), sang about the YMCA (the big gay pickup place in smalltown America, and New York as well), and sang about being “In the Navy” (the gay magnet of the services). And the Navy and the YMCA were so delighted with the publicity they were thinking of using the hits (and they were big Top Ten hits, too) for commercials, and then … then slowly it dawned (after about three years) that this concerned … no,
homosexuals!
Now if you lived in New York, you spotted this from the first single. You see the rest of America, God's Country, being so dense and näive (and then watch them fulminate and bluster when they catch on) and after a while you start thinking that the whole country is a backwater and you better never leave New York.

“I don't want to hear anti–New York talk from you ever again, young man!” Emma said, fully exercised now. The nurse came in a second later to run me out. “I
am
New York! Don't you forget that, buster!”

Did you know there was a subway—or rather, a mass transit train line—in Staten Island? You can't claim to have ridden them all if you haven't gone over and done that. Emma and I did, the weekend she got out of Bellevue before she went back to Indiana. Indiana lasted four weeks and then she was back in the city, coming up to my 96th Street apartment, and things rocked along. No, I didn't banish her from the door, no big scenes, no goodbye forever. I got out of my mood—it was a phase. Emma was my friend and New York was my city and the Theater was my livelihood—you forgive them their faults. There was one failing in myself, however, that was getting a little harder to overlook, and it took a production the next summer to convince me of it: I wasn't really all that talented.

1983

THE finest actress I met in New York was a co-star of mine, Reisa Goldbaum. Attractive (but not drop-dead beautiful) Jewish woman, early thirties, short thick body, blondish hair. I learned more about acting from her in two weeks than from anyone else ever. I even learned I wasn't cut out to be an actor.

“Gil,” said Reisa, answering the door in her bathrobe. “I didn't expect to see you here tonight.”

Her apartment was a fifth-story walk-up on First Avenue in the sixties. A box of a place, smartly decorated. I was imposing, it was 10:30 on a Monday night, but I had to talk to her.

“You want some coffee?”

She invited me in and I sat down on her sofa. Beside it on the coffeetable was the script for
Her Gentlest Touch.
She had surely memorized the thing by now, I thought, picking it up, thumbing through it while Reisa made coffee in the kitchen.

“Instant's all right, isn't it?”

Of course. Inside the script she had marked stresses, expressions, pauses, gestures. She was a real technician. Taking home her script each night and perfecting it, given the day's rehearsals. No director could improve on her self-discipline.

She started unsurely. “So, Greg tells me you're not in the show anymore, that you resigned.”

True. I'm sorry, it's very unprofessional. But they're calling the actor they almost cast and they think he'll do it.

“They said…” She cleared her throat, setting down the coffee. “They said at rehearsal today that you thought you weren't good enough for the part and that I had something to do with your going away—”

That's
why I had to come over and explain. I didn't want you to think it was because I couldn't work with you. It's simpler than that—you're too good for me, I can't match you up on that stage.

She laughed. “Pooh! Gil, you were excellent—just fine. You didn't have to go. Greg the director's in shock.”

I was adequate. No more.

“
I'm
just adequate, after all,” she said sitting down.

No Reisa. You are superb. (She tsk-tsked and waved this aside.) No, really. The fact you don't know it makes it all the more remarkable.

“I think you should reconsider, Gil,” she said after a sip. “It's a thankless role, I know. I get to emote and carry on and have mad scenes and you're the patient husband—it's not much of a role, you just react to my acting. Thankless, really. If you're discouraged about it, it's mostly the script's fault.”

Her Gentlest Touch
was by Morton Handley. It was based on the story of Lydia Proctor, the New England minor poet, very Virginia Woolf-like, intense, neurotic, complicated, suicidal, and I played her young husband Philip who had to cope with her spells of madness and her misbehavior. Proctor's verse was intermingled with the playwright's re-creation—a very classy, erudite production that about a hundred people would appreciate and half of that would actually attend. The director told me: “Gil, I want to see his pain, his regrets at marrying her, his anguish in that he still loves her—dig waaaayyy down deep for this one,” he went on. He spouted a lot of decades-old method acting stuff. “Think of a woman in your own life that was impossible, that was difficult and complicated and whom you loved, and maybe she loved you, but you would never
have
her completely! There'd always be a distance you'd never bridge!”